Assaulting Property Rights to One’s Inventions

James Edwards

November 30th, 2016

For a country with a momentous beginning, whose intellectual-property-rights approach produced the most iconic inventors and inventions in the world, recent changes to America’s patent system should be alarming.

Mark Twain wrote, “[A] country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backwards.”

America made writing “good patent laws” that secure intellectual property rights a high priority. The Founders enumerated the Patent Clause in Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution — the only individual right named in the Constitution itself.